My class did a writing test and I gave each piece of writing seven different marks for seven different categories: audience awareness/purpose, content/ ideas, structure/organisation, language resources, grammar, spelling, punctuation.
It only took me 36 hours to mark and two hours to enter the data. Now, with the data at my disposal, I can spot areas of weakness and focus on those in my classroom teaching, when I find time to do some.
Yes, I am a modern teacher.
The teacher next door eschews this data. He says he already knows his pupils' weaknesses because he spends quite a lot of his time in the classroom actually teaching.
He says he helps them individually with their own individual weaknesses as best he can. Yeah right!
At department meetings, I show my data diagrams in Powerpoint presentations.
I project the data on to a large screen and I have explanations and interpolations written under the diagrams. I then read the explanations aloud.
My neighbour scoffs at this approach and says the staff can already read.
Apparently he just refers to his markbook and his anecdotal jottings. Hah!
He is not a modern teacher.
I also use data to measure teacher success. It's easy: the data tells us how many pupils pass the exams in each teacher's class. It is a simple step to see who has the most passes and is, therefore, the best teacher.
Yes, I am a modern teacher.
Mr Markbook scoffs at such conclusions. He says that a teacher with few or even no passes may in fact be the most brilliant teacher in the school. He reckons it all depends on the mix of pupils in the class ... something about a silk purse and a sow's ear - whatever that means.
He is not a modern teacher.
When I check my data at the end of the year and see that Pupil A has raised his reading age from 13 to 14 years old, I take the credit. It will be because of the focus areas I concentrated on after analysing the data.
For I am a modern teacher.
Mr Markbook laughs at this suggestion. He says - get this - that I shouldn't take the credit, that the boy probably raised his reading age just by living. Reckons that sending texts, communicating on Facebook, reading magazines and watching TV would have done the job.
He also says that focusing on the two weak areas is dangerous because next year there will be two different areas of weakness. Says he just tries to cover all the areas all the time as each individual requires.
He is not a modern teacher.
Would you believe that he doesn't even use the data to highlight ethnicities that are not performing well enough! Says ALL pupils deserve attention regardless of ethnicity.
He started going on: I have a dream, he said, but I didn't hear the rest. Makes me wonder sometimes why the rest of us spend so much time gathering and collating all this data when there are colleagues who aren't even going to use it.
I am a modern teacher.
I even use the data to make comparisons with other schools. He laughs at this as well, saying something about "other factors, even in schools with the same decile ranking". He says we can do without the time-consuming, navel-gazing, bean-counting, number-crunching, data-driven drivel. I didn't bother to ask him for details.
I am data-driven. Data is the way, the truth, the life. Data delivers. And if there's any time left for learning environment interface, I think I will be able to deliver key deliverables going forward.
For I am a modern teacher.
